The Corrections

These last two chapters in the book focus on St. Jude and homecoming. The Lambert children’s relationships to home are resolved in different ways, as is the issue of Alfred and his illness. Although the book has been suspenseful and dramatic up until now, its ending is quiet and domestic. Many of the larger sources of suspense in the book—for example, the plot thread about the experimental brain therapy—are quietly set aside. Denise realizes that her father is in no shape to move to Philadelphia and try the Corecktall therapy, a realization that brings her both relief and sadness. Enid’s registered letter from the Axon Corporation is discovered, but the discovery annoys more than angers her family. Gary, meanwhile, continues to profit from his shares in the Axon Corporation and keeps his new source of wealth a secret from the other Lamberts. (Although the intuitive Enid suspects that Gary is hiding something.)

The sense is that these larger dramas have been distractions for the characters, as well as for the reader. They have been ways for the characters to avoid a drama that is literally and figuratively closer to home: that of Alfred’s aging and dying. Even the eventual stock-market corrections, another source of underground drama throughout the novel, turn out to be much milder than anticipated. There is an implicit connection between this “gentle letdown” of the market and the gentle ways in which the Lambert family finally resolve their difficulties, or in some cases do not resolve them (561). A family’s getting along often necessitates staying quiet about conflict, and Enid learns to accept Gary’s materialism and selfishness and not to take the bait when he badgers her about paying him back a four-dollar loan. She also learns not to pry into Denise’s private life, suspecting that she might not like what she discovers; at the same time, her decision to drop her friend Bea Meisner for making an anti-gay remark shows a half-conscious acceptance of her daughter’s sexuality.

Enid also realizes that she was never going to change her husband’s nature, and it is her acceptance of this central truth that allows her to be more accepting in other ways. Alfred’s move into a nursing home is an adjustment for the entire family and different from the neurological treatment in that it marks a realistic awareness of his condition rather than an attempted quick-fix solution to it. Although Alfred is not happy with his move to the nursing home, the measured and realistic thinking behind the move is also his own style of reasoning. As an engineer and an amateur scientist, Alfred is wary of quick fixes, partly because they are wasteful but also because they are disrespectful. He respects the concrete physical world—as opposed to the more evanescent world of the financial market—and respects careful craftmanship and hard work. This is seen in his frustration with poorly constructed Christmas lights at the beginning of Chapter 6 and his later happiness in that same chapter about fixing a drill: “Alfred’s eyes were fixed on the drill now, his face bright with the possibility of solving a problem” (493).

Alfred also finds a deeper solace in fixing objects, as a man whose mind and body is failing him. It gives him a sense of control and mastery that he is generally losing—and knows himself to be losing. Another source of solace to Alfred is the arrival of Chip, his middle son. Alfred’s tender feelings for Chip are made overt in Chapter 6, as if his physical frailty has made him less able to suppress these feelings. Although Chip has been consumed throughout the book with not living up to his father’s expectations, Alfred seems in this chapter to put Chip on a special pedestal. He thinks of Chip as his “intellectual son,” and seems to expect him to solve problems that he cannot even quite articulate: “It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question. And the question was: The question was:” (464).

Chip does solve the problem of Alfred, in the sense that he helps to put him in a nursing home. Chip also becomes a more responsible son in general, moving back to the Midwest and taking over many caretaking duties from Gary. Unlike Gary, Chip does not seem to be motivated by a desire for control or a sense of superiority; he seems to want only to help and even accedes to Enid’s wish to stay in her large and unmanageable house. Chip has seen the extent of his father’s frailty, and his motivations in caring for his parents are charitable rather than financial. He understands that not every human exchange is a transactional one and that not all rewards are material. He has perhaps been led to this viewpoint by his disillusioning experience in Lithuania and also by Denise’s decision to forgive him the $20,000 he owes her. Chip is initially panicked, rather than relieved, by Denise’s generosity: Paying his debt had seemed to him like one way of structuring his life as well as of becoming completely independent from his family. However, he comes to realize that such independence is not desirable and that human bonds are more solid than financial ones—a Midwestern value he did not appreciate before.